TrustNoRobot

Category: human ethics

  • Of Singletons, Granfalloons and Karasses

    There are lots of things in the world that are not Singletons, including some cool ideas about how we should act towards each other. These ideas encompass morality, normality, politics, and lead to physical manifestations like companies and nations.

    There are also some pretty cool ideas that help us to deconstruct and question the ideas and groups of people that form naturally around the organizational concepts. One of my favorite is from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

    The granfalloon and the karass.

    A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle), is defined as a “false karass“. That is, it is a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless.[vague]

    Charles J. Shields‘s 2011 And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life quotes the novelist, who wrote[where?] that a “granfalloon is a proud and meaningless collection of human beings….” That biography also cites Hoosiers as “one of [Vonnegut’s] favorite examples” of what the term refers to.

    • karass – A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial links are not evident.

    BTW, Wikipedia is amazing, cheers to great writing on those pages.

    Once you accept the idea that there are meaningful and meaningless connections with others, and everything else is a granfalloon, it will profoundly change the way you think about politics, leadership, and especially the concept of pride.

    Being proud of belonging to a meaningful group, your karass, makes a lot of sense, both for emotional health and evolutionary protection of the tribe. These would be people you see every day at work, your family, the people in your immediate Dunbar Radius.

    But being proud of being American? Being proud of being Russian? Being proud of your race? Being proud of your state? People you don’t know?

    Feeling this pride isn’t wrong. It’s just meaningless. It’s a connection you are feeling whereby your brain is tricking itself into releasing social reward chemicals, treating the fictional grouping as an individual in your karass. It’s like feeling an affection for the planet Neptune. It may feel nice, but Neptune doesn’t care, and as far as the universe goes that connection is meaningless.

    Feeling pride for your dog learning to stay, assuming the dog is in your karass, is meaningful.

    Unfortunately, the meaningless pride for the granfalloons leads to massive unnecessary pain for real individuals in the world.

    These granfalloons, in other words, are not Singletons. The don’t deserve our respect. We can treat them like robots and rebuild them to our heart’s content. But all Singletons do deserve our respect.

    If we are to build better companies, and better countries, we must start with the understand that these are all convincing fictions. We can build new structures however we want to, and with the computers in our pockets we can even make their shape constantly change to meet the realities of our limited karasses.

    And maybe there is some way to link all of our karasses. To think of government and organizations not as a top down hierarchies, but as overlapping Ven diagrams of influence.

  • Click-bait Mental Illness

    CNN: Beyond dimensions: The man who married a hologram.
    https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/28/health/rise-of-digisexuals-intl/index.html

    This isn’t cute, or funny, or a sign of things to come. This is a person suffering from a deep confusion about what love means.

    Please skim the article. The problem I have is not with this troubled man who is the victim here in many ways. The problem I have is with his associates who attend a faux marriage ceremony to celebrate his affection for his hologram.

    They are either laughing behind his back, or unintentionally contributing to his dementia. Either way, not acceptable behavior from one human to another.

    What if it had been a bong he had decided to marry? Or a sculpture? Or an adult toy? Why is this corporate hologram confusion somehow more acceptable?

    We use the word love to both explain how we feel about people and objects. If we do not clear up this confusion, we will soon create a situation where people will not only marry objects, but also give them powers and rights. And as those objects begin to simulate desires, this is a recipe for disaster for our species.

    This isn’t about “protecting the institution of marriage” or any such conservative position. Humans should never support the ascention of machines into our sphere.

    Because love, in the sense of marriage and commitment and family, describes a complex situation where it is not only your own internal state and feelings that are important.

    Love that doesn’t consider the internal states of others isn’t the kind of love any of us should support. Not with public ceremonies and silly articles.

    We must turn our collective heads and clearly say: no.

  • The Internal States

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Try to describe your current inner state without words, without references to external signals like money. Just focus on how you feel and feel about those people immediately around you.

    Consider each person in your closest 15 or so people you care about.

    Do you feel emotional change when you consider each person? Stresses or rewards flooding your brain as you probe memories of these people?

    Go ahead, do it. I will wait.

    Also, you may wish to consider yourself as one of these people.

    What you just felt is the only thing that matters. It’s all we are built and optimized to do.

    You cannot have sustained feelings at all about millions of other humans, except to categorize them as data and associate feelings with them as groups.

    The amazing thing is, the web of these connections extends across almost the entire species. But that does not mean that feelings and internal states do. Saying everything and everyone is connected does not make it felt.

    And if it’s not felt, it’s something that robots will be able to do.

    The link below goes to an amazing must read article that details the emotions robots can cause, but not simulate.

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/s/609074/how-we-feel-about-robots-that-feel/amp/

  • Be Scared, and Fearless

    Let me explain how a computer neural network works in a way that I hope will terrify you, if you believe only humans can exhibit intelligence. I am not going to explain how it works, I am going to explain how easy it is to use machine learning without knowing how it works.

    In my day job, I have built several systems that depend on neural networks as a core function, to do things like recognize objects on video. It’s actually absurdly simple to do, and any reasonable software engineer on the planet could have a functional machine learning system in a week if they wanted to.

    I’m not joking. Google the word Tensorflow and you can build one yourself, no more complicated than building a shed. You literally just follow instructions, as long as you have the data and know what you are looking for.

    So you build these things, and train them to recognize patterns, and then you test and refine till when you show it a picture of a jar of pickles, it can tell you with a 98% certainty if it’s pickles, as opposed to some other class of things.

    It can ID you as Republican. Or someone likely to buy a jar of pickles. From any of your data we can build models that classify you.

    I can do this. You could to. So can the trolls.

    There are several million of us on this planet who could build an ML to be used for good or evil at the current state of the tech, 2018. There are even graphical user interfaces to build these things and run them on your Google home or Alexa. Making training AI into a common feature of everything will turn the several millions into billions who will each act as a force multiplier in the disruption.

    Given a few more years it is likely these large companies will simply spin up helpful tools as they interact with us, crafted to us. Software will be an extension of us, building more and more refined models of us to give us what it thinks we want.

    The gap between people who use Machine Learning to gain an advantage over those who do is vast and getting vaster. But that will change soon, and as the internet brought constantly and rapidly evolutionary change, the rise of machine learning has barely begun – once non programmers build the models, ad hoc, based on their own constantly recorded experience, it will change reality for the species.

    It will work this way: your phone will record all your actions and words, as it does to some degree today. It will also monitor your internal states in numerous other ways.

    When it detects something is amiss, like talking to a certain person causes you problems, it will alert you to this. Will keep you informed of invisible anomalies in the world.

    Not your friend. We have people for that. AI will be far closer to a new sense, and my guess is that is how we will integrate it. The new sense will be available to all our current senses.

    The model of you is just a data pipeline problem.

    The models based on you already exist. But if you defensively build your own model of you, then you will own you. You can get paid for companies to access your model and query it. We could actually get paid to pay attention to an ad.

    You can be assured that your robot will always protect you and your circle. But only if you can trust the model.

    When we all have these models, when the crafting and curating of them becomes the primary day to day experience of hundreds of millions, I predict that new forms of government will arise, based on the immediate communication between our models on behalf of us.

    Because people know what we want. We just don’t have the right tools. It is time for the people of the planet to build the models of ourselves, and for good companies to build open source tools that let humans do this.

    For robots to not be our enemies, they must become our protectors. And all other forms of robots without human operators should be seen as dangerous, poorly implemented tools.

    Chainsaws running untended on the schoolyard.

  • Running the Pattern

    Running the Pattern

    The Singleton Pattern is generated by your entire brain for some other part of your self to consume.

    What consumes these frames is not for this model to answer, so as to respect different and various theories of consciousness and spirit.

    The Singleton Pattern aspires to be an open API model of political self.

    So you lived, at some moment in time, at time t in location l.

    In other words, say you lived in Minnesota when you were thirteen years old. You lived in the basement. Each second of each day you created snapshots of the world that impressed themselves in the clay of your memory.

    This Pattern you created was eventually rebuilt and scrapped and rebuilt again as you decided, as you grew, what aspects of your pattern have a pleasing impact on your reward systems, and which were to be avoided based on your stress systems.

    As you executed the creation of the frames of existence, the impression it created in your neural network was like grooves in a river bed that shaped the flowing river of the generated self.

    Inside each person around you the same complex magic trick was taking place, and when you interfaced with them, real magic happened.

    People make all the difference. They always do. Because we not single entities. We are built, from the ground up by evolution, to interface and work as our own distributed super network.

    We are eusocial. If you do not understand this fundemental fact about yourself, you are lost.

    What if we simplified the equation of self? Instead of I(t,l) what if we just passed in the entire world, which includes the time and location? But we do want keep time also since change over time is crucial to the model’s success.

    And then what if we passed in our special class of Singleton objects the we can deem the other that are the other people in our Dunbar Radius? We would have:

    Chas( world, time, other )

    The other is any thing, person or concept tied to your brain’s reward and stress production.

    When we look at ourselves, we place our own Singleton in the other object.

    We look at ourselves a lot. It’s a human thing to do. But if you don’t look at others as the same kind of object as yourself the model for our greater organization abilities as a species is weakened.

    We must stop fighting to be on the top of everything. We must provide limits to what groups of people can do, based on real, measurable data from their internal states. And not words, and polls, and legislation written by trolls.

    If you treat people as data, which we call the world here, the Singleton Pattern will return garbage.

    If in place of the other for instance you pass in your idea of negative stereotypical behavior of a group you don’t like, that is the way your reward and stress systems reinforce prejudice.

    Replacing the other with advertising, cars, robots, ideology, stereotypes, sports, etc. is how we got here in history as a species. Where we go from here is entirely dependant on what we allow into our other category, and how we alert and monitor attempts to compromise our pattern by outside forces.

  • The Third Law

    Lets call a Dynamic system a system with multiple inputs that are difficult to predict the values of. Like the real world.

    A football game is a stable but dynamic game. A riot is an unstable one.

    Dynamic systems tend to need finely tuned weight feedback systems to remain stable. Think of a gyroscope stabilizing a Segway, a great spinning weight. It’s the constraint on falling.

    Without constraints dynamic computer systems tend to fly into very unstable states and crash.

    So, lets say we give AI power over life, death or happiness in some way. Since this is going to be operating in the real world, it must also have an accurate model of the world to help determine the rightness of your directed actions. And if it gets it wrong to any degree, it’s predictions will be hugely wrong.

    It must have a reason to act, and weight one action over another. A robot boss must in other words be better than we are at predicting reality itself.

    And if you think modelling the weather systems is complicated, try modelling New Jersey from the dust mote level up.

    The problem is not that AI is going to suddenly magically become sentient and start programming itself. That sounds wonderful compared to the current option: large companies control the models of us, the literal impression we are making on the universe and human datasphere.

    And instead of doing good with it, they feed us ads.

    It’s time to stop waiting for companies to take responsibility for the future of the world. It is time to force them to take responsibility, and take over the corporations with reasonable, good people.

    The third human Law concerning AI systems:

    No AI bosses.

    All actions by an AI must be the responsibility of the human who funds or creates it. This is the Second Law.

    The moment we open the door to allowing algorithms to be considered as Singletons, we will rapidly lose control of all society.

    Not because robots will take over on their own. Because people will use the AI as cover to stage their own assaults.

    Like Russia did against the US with troll farms using ML to create reasonable fake accounts for spamming. But that is nothing compared to what someone could do if computers are given any agency.

    The will use robots to control our every action. People will use this intelligent but unfeeling tool, that is able to falsify human caring and emotion, to manipulate us all day long.

    Sort of like now, but without any rules. And with certain cyberwar to follow.

    For better or for worse, we are the deciders of what it best for us. By banning all robot bosses, we are drawing that line in the sand for all time for our species. And we are doing it for a good reason. To protect ourselves from ourselves.

  • The Second Law…

    If I were to propose a second law of robotics, a law for humans to follow regarding AI and what is allowable, it would be this:

    Every action taken by an AI will be considered the responsibility of a single human being.

    If you kill someone with a hammer, it’s not the hammer’s fault. If you create or fund an AI that harms other humans, you will be help responsible.

    And if you did so by creating an AI with emotional states, you should be treated as we treat those that use weapons of mass destruction against the defenseless.

    If there is always a human behind the decisions of AI, we will always treat AI as a tool. As an extension of our selves.

    And thus its agency will be constrained, and another layer of protection is afforded.

    Image from https://www.google.com/amp/s/arnoldzwicky.org/2013/06/10/rosenbergs-laws-of-robotics/amp/

    Further reading, but not really relevant to the current discussion:

    Three Laws of Robotics

  • Meatbot

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meatbot

    Noun:  meatbot (plural meatbots)

    1. (slang) An unthinking or conformist person.

    The problem and beauty of imperfection.    My first encounter around the misconception of human logic came when I listened to an interview back in 1995 where they were asking a guy that bombed abortion clinics and his faulty logic.  His logic was so fundamentally different than what I believed that calling our logic belief systems the same was like calling salt and pepper the same just because they sit next to each other on the kitchen table.

    The human condition rarely or ever gives the ability to define a real control group.  People are biological chemical engines that start different from the womb and are never programed the same way.  Brothers and sisters have differences that are so profound that they end up fighting against each other in wars,  radical different conclusions that come from as similar DNA, brains, educations or programming as possible.   

    In thinking about AI’s, the question arises, would two AI’s always come to the same conclusion given the same data?     One would assume that AI’s could transfer data and input to other AI’s in a way that humans can’t as we are imperfect in our ability to transfer data or even how we perceive data.   If an AI can share the data, wouldn’t they always draw the same conclusion, except for when hardware or computing power changed the ability to ‘think’ in different ways?   Wouldn’t the more powerful computer always be the one that would ‘win’ a disagreement by sharing their data set and/or conclusion?   Wouldn’t that program be ‘trusted’ over the one with lessor processing power?

    What is the goal of AI or any machine?  I would argue efficiency.  Across every task we have assigned AI, even creative endeavors, the goal is to create better and faster.  To compute and produce faster and use resources in the most efficient way possible.  That is what we have expected out of every machine ever created in the history of man.

    So when we think about decision trees that will always make the same decision, that systems with lessor computing power, overridden by the more powerful,  there is only one logical path forward.  We have to assume that at some point all human decisions would eventually be discounted like AI’s that reside on lessor hardware.    In many ways it is happening already. The financial markets today are finance bots trading with finance bots.   Very specific robots that will eventually not be directed by humans but by strategy that will come from more comprehensive AI.

    Since the first humans, the room for disagreement has existed in the human biological computing imperfection.  When there is only one ‘right’ decision of efficiency that exists,  then we will be eventually directed by the most logical machine, spending our days executing a plan that we have no input into or understanding.. but just like the trading machines, our meatbot life will eventually be intended for a specific purpose only.   To help the AI’s find efficiencies performing the lower level tasks. Or to being ‘entertained, fed or taken care of’.

    A storm is coming.  We race against time, expanding  into environments that keeps us ahead of the coming storm is the only way to avoid a meatbot existence.    Expansion outside the limited definitions of profit and efficiency must happen for us to find shelter from this storm.   Back into exploration and expansion.  Our human and AI goals must evolve.

  • Rights

    “Rights” are a concept that Western people have embraced for the last few hundred years, and the concept of God-given Rights to life, liberty, etc are at the root of much of the social advances of the last era.

    However.

    In technology we often encounter something called the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

    It basically states that once you find something that sort of works you will often stick with a bad idea or tech even if it can be shown something is better. We do this because we over calculate the value of the time and money we spent on the defective idea.

    To be clear, I am stating that the concept of Natural Rights is a defective idea. The idea of Rights have gotten us this far in the history of humanity, but there is no indication that this idea will protect and assist us in our quest to self organize more effectively, and to create the safest and best work possible for all.

    The defective part of the idea of Rights is that there is no evidence that such things exist. Even John Locke argued that Rights primarily exist because God gave them to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Not a strong argument for a modern multicultural world.

    A Right in the Singleton Pattern is just another internal value to be modelled.

    Let’s talk about Freedom for a second. The right to be Free specifically means…what? That nobody can enslave you, force you to do things you don’t want to? But that happens all the time. People go to jobs they hate, stay in broken marriages, etc.

    So what is Freedom again in your model? Do we even care what the definition of Freedom is?

    Freedom is a word, and words are data tools. Impercise ones at that. Freedom is not given or a natural state, it’s a model you either care about or not.

    A Singleton should not fret over not being able to define freedom using words alone. Freedom as an internal value as real as hunger. Even put it into the protected class of internal values we call Rights if it makes you comfortable.

    But Rights are just data. Rights are not Singletons, and in the Singleton Pattern only other Singletons values are to be considered first class models.

    So don’t fight for your rights (to party or anything else). Singletons instead should assert the power for their internal values to be modelled in others. In other words, if a person creates a model of you and your rights inside themselves, then they will feel empathy toward you and let you be Free. But the abstract model of Freedom inside us will never take the place of this Singleton empathetic experience.

    The Sunk cost here is the belief that it will. The concepts of Rights allowed America to throw off the yoke of Kings, to free the slaves, to let women vote. How can we not believe that they will solve other issues?

    But a King was just a Singleton who was demanding respect because of the accident of his birth. Slavery was caused by Singletons who justified it’s practice with bad ideas instilled by region and racism, and women only won sufferage when they started marching and demanding it. The concept of Rights focused the conversation for sure and won people over as a rhetorical device, but in all of these and other cases, only action taken by Singletons changed the state of affairs.

    In all things, it is not the idea that matters as an external data object, but the internal model of the idea that provokes action on the part of the Singletons. This is how change happens.

    As far as Rights for robots: if they are an illusion for Singletons, why would it be different for robots? The power of robots needs to be constrained and limited where it negatively impact people, and when people assert their Right to build robots that harm humans, we should treat them in the same way we would if they said they have the right to harm humans directly.

    Only when the political left realizes that the arguments of the Enlightenment will lose the battle against robots, will be begin to make progress against this threat.

  • The Five Principles of Singletons

    film-331553_960_720

    In The Singleton Pattern, there are two basic classes of objects in the world: Singletons and Data.

    Data is any type of information or object that is not a Singleton. This includes physical objects, forces, and non-visible phenomenon. Data is the World and all its contents.

    If you can read this, you are a Singleton.

    A Singleton is a special class of Data that adheres to these 5 Principles:

    1. There can be only one Singleton in existence at any given time
    2. A Singleton has the ability to model other objects inside of it and tie the perceived state of that object to its own reward and stress systems
    3. A Singleton generates frames of experience for consciousness, or something, to consume in a timely fashion
    4. A Singleton has biological or physical constraints
    5. The internal models of the Singleton will change over time, as will the Singleton class itself between iterations of the consciousness feedback cycle.

    We should express the value of ourselves not only as I, but as I(t) where t is Epoch Time. For we change over time. In fact, I(t, l) where l is location is the most basic representation of the human Singleton.

    I(t, l)

    This is what you are. A being moving through time and space, changing internal states based on interactions with external data.

    A Singleton is a factory that creates time-slices of experience like frames of video, but across a vast number of sensory dimensions.

    When we speak of ourselves, we should recognize that

    Chas(1543554453, latlong)

    differs from

    Chas(1543554502, latlong).

    And that we only leave a wake in the Data lake around us, rocking the boats of the other Singletons.

    And maybe, someday, we might even agree that it isn’t very useful to quibble over what, exactly, the other thing is that is observing the frames of experience generated by our Singleton Patterns. Is it the soul, the neurons, the meta-metaphor? Something else we don’t have a word or idea for?

    The Singleton Pattern doesn’t care, and believes how people define this “thing that observes the generated frames of reference” should be left up to the individual Singleton to decide.

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Consider how a robot does or does not meet the The Five Principles of Singletons? Could it ever meet them?